Two Weeks in the Midday Sun

The Pulitzer Prize–winning critic recounts his visit to the 1987 Cannes Film Festival while commenting on movies, celebrities, and the industry's future.

"Perhaps the best book ever written about experiencing the Cannes Film Festival. . . . Classic." —Bright Lights Film Journal

More about people than movies, this book is an intimate, quirky, and witty account of the parade of personalities attending one of the most glamorous and peculiar of cinematic rituals: the Cannes Film Festival. Specifically, the 1987 festival—Roger Ebert's twelfth, and the fortieth anniversary of the event. Ebert presents lighthearted ruminations on his daily routine and computer troubles alongside more serious reflection on directors such as Fellini and Coppola, screenwriters like Charles Bukowski, actors such as Isabella Rossellini and John Malkovich, the very American press agent and social maverick Billy "Silver Dollar" Baxter, and the stylishly plunging necklines of yore. He also comments on the trajectory of the festival itself and the "enormous happiness" of sitting, anonymous and quiet, in an ordinary French café. And, of course, he talks movies.

Illustrated with Ebert's charming sketches of the festival and featuring both a new foreword by Martin Scorsese and a new postscript by Ebert about an eventful 1997 dinner with Scorsese at Cannes, Two Weeks in the Midday Sun is a small treasure, a window onto the mind of this connoisseur of criticism and satire, a man always so funny, so un-phony, so completely, unabashedly himself.

"Sharp, wry and—for this Cannes veteran—right on the mark." —The New York Times

"Ebert's pieces have the punch and precision of good short fiction." —The Denver Post

"A charming little book. . . . Frenzies and all, Ebert brings it seductively back." —Los Angeles Times